So, in the light of this spreading provenly bad ideas shouldn't be made as cheap of a process that it is now.

Also, you can refute all you want, but if the bad ideas are better clickbait than your refutations, they will spread faster.

Younger me was a free speech ultimatist. Alas, human nature.

Propaganda works, so well that people aren’t even aware of changing their minds. Overton windows. Blowback, where refuting further cements the falsehood. Belief as attire.

Etc, etc.

We just used to find that acceptable. Wars have been started by fake news from "reputable" sources. If fake news regulations become widespread and usable, they would be trivially easy for the rich and the government to abuse for censorship.

Can you imagine how this would have gone had the president had the ability to prevent "fake news" from spreading ?

https://globalnews.ca/news/4209011/trump-immigrant-animal-fa...

(I would argue that in Europe this "fake news" censorship is in fact pretty much normal. Only ... a part of the fake news isn't fake at all, but rather embarrassing to the government. The situation with rioting in French cities is 100x worse than sites like "Le Monde" report (which ones? Let's just say any > 1 mil ppl and there's only a few you'd be wrong about. Nice is pretty damn bad, for instance. Destruction in the city center every friday. You should see the security measures shops are taking, wtf). And other things that the government doesn't like get extremely downplayed as well : France was pretty much shut down due to a student strike in Paris for Macron's labor laws 3 times, and twice for his agricultural policy (both of which are downright abusive, and I'd say the protests were very justified) ... and there was a small mention of a protest march in Le Monde. Mass car torchings are a weekly occurrence since 2005 or so where I live. It baffles me, but it really looks like they're literally doing this just to save face for that asshole Macron. I get it ... I get it. He "saved Europe", especially after Brexit. He also fucked up France, and that matters more to me, and should matter more to French media and French voters. It's absurd because there literally isn't a single person in France that doesn't know these events happen, so what's the point of keeping them out of newspapers ? Do they think people will just forget ?)

This meme I do not understand. There is one physical reality[0]. A thing either happened, or it didn't. Physics doesn't change its workings because of perspective. A precise enough statement about reality can be either true or false, there's no middle. There's no "depends on perspective". If I say, "the Sun is shining", the truth of that fact does not depend on perspective.

Of course, very often we're dealing with complex statements that deal with many aspects of reality simultaneously. We often talk about indirect evidence. But that doesn't suddenly open a wormhole to a post-truth dimension. We have tools and frameworks to deal with that. We can say, there is strong evidence that this occurred. Or, there's strong evidence that it didn't. Or, the current evidence points in neither way.

Arguing that truth and lies are a matter of perspective is just trying to deliberately confuse people. After all, if we really accept this view, then reality doesn't exist, nothing makes sense, and we can all go back to the caves we came from.

--

[0] - simulation ideas and other things aside, though they are all conveniently defined in a way indistinguishable from us all being separate minds inhabiting one reality.

But anyway, as you say, complex statements typically involve multiple facts, assumptions, inferences, conclusions and speculation. And yes, we have language for that.

The problem, though, is that people often express complex statements in simple language. They gloss over complexity, and hide assumptions, inferences, speculation, etc. So it's easy to have multiple stories claiming to be true. And it takes considerable work to decompose them, and determine which best fits the facts.

That's very true. My point is that we need to do that work - and encourage people to do that work, and teach them how to do it - instead of just saying that "lie is a matter of perspective" and giving up.

Your comment is exactly why it is so important that we continue to value free speech. Many people are utterly convinced that their views of reality represent absolute and objective truth, totally unaware of the philosophical assumptions underpinning their woldview. History is full of people convinced their view of reality represented absolute and objective truth. They seldom agreed.

Giving such people the tools to censor their opponents is very dangerous. First, the set of people who are wielding those tools will inevitably change. Secondly, well, where they burn books, they will someday burn people.

#1

While I think of myself as a Popperian, I've begun to adopt a "true enough to act now" view of the world. It's close to the notion "a good plan violently executed today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow".

Mostly, I'm sick of the debate. I have relatives and friends who are creationists, climate change deniers, supply-siders, etc. Instead of trying to convince (persuade) people about the truth, opposing the torrent of bullshit forces pushing these idealogical rocks up hill, I now focus on "ok, what can we do today?"

In the case of evolution (vs creationism). The value of the theory isn't that it's true (or not). Rather, the value is a set of axioms that allows us to make reasonably good predictions about the world.

So when it comes to the complicated topics (eg current events), I'm trying to relax my standards for objective truth, be satisfied with "true enough, for now".

#2

We need more data. (aka You can't manage what you can't measure.)

I was a tree hugger when GIS and satellite imagery were being rolled out. They completely changed the conversation about clearcutting, habitat loss, impacts, etc. It was no longer a just propaganda war. Legislators could see for themselves, if they wanted to, what was happening.

#3

Stop fighting "fake news". There's a better way.

Verifiable attribution, sources. All source data needs to be published.

Every publisher (that wants to be verifiable) would have their own blockchain(s), sign their own works. Whenever a reader sees a news item, they could verify the authenticity by checking the block chain.

This is no different than adding SHAs to software releases.

Each blockchain would be seeded with a CA, leveraging our current chain of trust infrastructure.

#4

Also, the story is made in the edit. So publishers need to show their work. Just like in science. Sure, cut down a two-hour interview to just 5 minutes. But you still have to post the original footage.

#5

No one challenged my abandonment of "free speech ultimatism." So what's the alternative?

Recognizing that cognition is social, that we (mostly) cohabitant a shared reality:

Defending public discourse from the abuses of free speech is a tragedy of the commons [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons]. This framing goes further than Paradox of Tolerance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance] by justifying the limitation of some speech in service of the greater good.

[Maybe call it the "marketplace of ideas" to engage the Freedom Markets™ zealots.]

I have no idea how to police the commons.

But I do think punishing parties for knowingly lying would be a good start.

There was a time when FCC broadcast licenses where contingent on serving the public good. And license renewals were serious business.

I'd be okay with doing the same for online mediums as well.

There would be two classes of speech: anonymous and verified (per #3 above). Verified speech, and the aggregators, would vouch for what they say.

If someone is found guilty of using verified speech to harm the public good (jury of their peers, public hearings), their root CA would get revoked.

They can still publish anonymously, of course. But they can no longer claim to be telling the truth.

---

Okay. Thanks for listening, humoring me. I have these notions rattling around in my head. And I like your comment history. And wanted to share with someone(s), in case I get hit by a bus.

Would you be interested in fleshing it out as an Everipedia page? If you're not editing Everipedia yet, I can help you with that. Anonymously,if you like. Or I could write the page, with your permission and perhaps input.

We can still quantify that fact and include it in our reasoning.

This also resonates with me

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Harry_Frankfurt's_con...

Add "profit motive" and it perfectly explains con artists like Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Ben Carson, too many to list.

Like P. T. Barnum before them, the primary intent is to fleece their audience. Suck them in with the outrage, then empty their wallets.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Another problem is what happens when bad actors come into power and get to do the censoring? We’ve just handed them a nice precedent, have we not?

Not successful censorship per-se, but attempted censorship. See the "Streisand Effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

But of course that requires good communicators, while many people with in-depth knowledge are not even mediocre ones.

Meanwhile, bullshitters have a much easier job.

eg. the creationist argument "If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?" doesn't even make sense, it just sounds good, confirms existing bias, conveys the (false) feeling of understanding, etc. As a result, it is unfortunately very persuasive, and continues to spread much faster than the refutations, which aren't as simple and don't give the same superficial "aha" jolt of satisfaction.

In fact, the closest I've come to a refutation that works as well is "well, if selective breeding of dogs is true, why do we still have wolves?", but of course then you still have to follow up with one or more examples of natural selection mechanisms & the idea of non-uniform environments (more small and fast prey over here, dry and cold weather over there, etc.), or you're inadvertently confirming their bias by introducing an intelligent selecting agency as part of your argument.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

How about we just let the people who own the machines decide what data sits on their machines?

So I agree, decentralization will allow some communities to be total free market reddits and chans where anything goes, and I expect them to be very unpleasant places to hang out for some and not others.

I'll be over here in my private community where Microsoft can't read my discussions and anyone whining about the priest-media will be booted.

Decentralization will give people the opportunity to spread their hatred among themselves, without involving me, which is... exactly how things operate today.

So... Bring on infotech decentralization, I guess. It's got its merits, and for me, nothing about all this hate speech will change.

I have the impression that the general quality of available information has only gone up.

I think it's no accident, that the rise of fascism and totalitarian Stalinism is coincident with the rise of radio and the maturing fields of advertising and mass psychology. This is the first wave it got a magnitude cheaper, to reach big audiences. We're witnessing the second one. (Third one if you count the printing press, but the adoption happened over generations, so societies had time to adopt)

Nowadays intentionally bad ideas work like spam, they have only an very small individual chance to get hold of a person, but with an near infinite number of permutations for free, it's way more likely to hit each individuals psychological weak spot eventually.

So it was never easier to spread ideas for individuals, but so it for all sorts of corporate and even nation actors posing as individuals.

Even though the printing press kicked off societal changes that took a few centuries to mature and settle down, it was only slow by our current standards. The societies and institutions that were being disrupted evolved in an environment that changed on millenial timescales, so they were, in some senses, shell shocked for most of those 'few centuries' due to a failure to adapt despite having ample (by our standards) time, and the new institutions that arose were regarded as disruptive upstarts for generations (eg. the Lutheran church).

Anyway. An order-of-magnitude change is going to be just as disruptive, even if the change is from "snail's pace" to "tortoise-like".

That makes sense for shared forums. But not in the case of someone like Alex Jones, where he has his own media platform on his own site and various channels, and not in the case of Gab where they're hosting their own forum.

Technically Sodium reacts with water, so if you keep them apart it should be fine.

Does not translate to

Carry sodium in your pocket, as long as your pocket is dry.

------

In non analogy terms - this is not how forums work anymore, at all.

This was maybe how they worked back in the bbs days or slashdot era.

Today - theyre just places to generate noise and saturate human attention.

The battle has moved to another level entirely, and people who bring up incorrect information are literally predictable props, used to confuse the audience.

Trolls KNOW how a comment is going to be refuted, and form statements which will either

1) dodge the filter,

2) be not vile, but will smuggle/trojan in arguments which are vile

3) overwhelm the ability of people to defend

And if all of the above fail, they will harass or use other methods to "win".

The objective is screen real estate, to be the dominant thought.

Which is to say, if you already know about the bad idea, having it refuted is presumably a good thing, but if you don't know about the bad idea in the first place, learning about it in order to have it refuted may actually backfire.

Your right to drive is unimpaired, but the privilege of driving that you enjoy most definitely is.

Most movements to expand rights to new groups are opposed by those who would thereby experience a diminution of their privelege (which is always relative).

This is also why you have the wealthy so often opposing policies that will create more wealth for everyone including themselves, because those same policies reduce their relative advantages.

I'd love you to show me that there is a repeatable and measurable experiment that determines that as a fundamental function of the universe, people should have equal rights.

Personally, I don't believe that (the fact it's a universal truth) to be true, morals and ethics are a subjective topic and stuff like "everyone should have equal right" is something that most people including me can agree on fairly easily. Other people might not agree.

Looking at that line of thinking it's ridiculous, there are assumptions and a gross misunderstanding of correlation and causation and confounding factors. But if you are not educated enough to see the problems in those arguments (which I think would be a higher level of education required than believing in flat earth) or if you are a little bit inclined to let someone walk you down a "logical" path of fallacies then it's easy to make that leap. And that's an easy argument for a white nationalist to make. It's a lot less easy for someone to refute it.

    > But is one’s life diminished by hearing bad 
    > ideas? I don’t think so

Let's say I publish an article alleging you murdered your previous girlfriend/boyfriend. It goes viral. A month later, the truth airs! Someone publishes a follow-up explaining that you are innocent. Do you think your life will just go back to normal?

If the bad idea was that you and your family should be killed or forcibly expelled from your jobs and homes, and you heard it discussed seriously and frequently by your neighbors, police officers, and elected officials--yeah, I think that might diminish your quality of life in some ways.

Look at anti-vaxxers. A small group of hysterical "do-gooders" educated by bad ideas are doing a lot of harm and if it's up to them would reverse the arguably greatest achievement in medical history.

Kids actually get killed thanks to the efforts of those assholes.

And secondly, when the masses weary of arguing nonsense ideas, there is a danger of them becoming acceptable. If we all stop arguing when the trolls repeat yet again that jews/immigrants/women/gays are sub-human and should be removed, some people will take that silence as assent and the violence begins.

So what we need is some kind of snopes for ideas, where our brightest and best could weigh good and bad ideas, and the rest of us could just point to their results. But wait - that's what a university* is! And it's no coincidence that the trolls direct their fiercest fury at academics.

*Trump University excepted.

* Typo

We humans have a strong preference for ideas that support our existing beliefs. This feature, when combined with the proliferation of sources of news and other information (who directly profit from this feature), means that the ones who are most in need of hearing the refutation of a bad idea are also the least likely to ever hear it.

This is one reason every issue has become so polarized these days, people don't hear the detractors they just get their own views amplified back to them.

I mean, at some point you realize that people have figured out repetition is the point and there can't be any refutation if they just do not acknowledge it.

Your outlook recalls the way the internet was 20 years ago, when, for instance, holocaust deniers had their little group on Usenet, and idealists could spend eternity providing evidence they were wrong. It seems so quaint now.

In some cases (climate change denial, flat-earthers, geocentrism, Holocaust denial, etc.), the refutation may also presume a higher level of scientific, historical, or other general knowledge than the bad idea. Bad ideas that play upon our cognitive / perceptual biases have lasted for millenia, and they are very hard to dislodge from the public mind. To some extent, these are all bad ideas that people have to be educated and/or socialized out of.

IMHO, this is one of those precepts that most people want to be true. Unfortunately, we're not yet in that perfectly educated rational utopia :s

That seems like a bad idea. Can you prove that given historical data and current data? Show me where the spread of bad ideas on social networks has been a net positive in large populations. Show me where the refutation of bad ideas has been effective in those populations. Provide a time scale as well.

Even if you don't believe your parents, you still got no vaccine, and other crazy medical treatments even the comic books can't imagine.

"Oh! We need to block this harmful speech. Think of the children! "

Because the subject of this thread is Microsoft deciding what they want host, not the government telling Microsoft what they are permitted to host.

A similar difference exists between preventing children from gambling, and preventing adults from gambling away the money required to feed their children.

Even though the harm in the latter examples is actually easier to substantiate, curtailing spreech because of the harm adults might do (even to children) is rather difficult, so demagogues tend to focus on the former for their bombast.

If mere exposure to bad ideas is this dangerous then mass scale democracy is not viable. The viability of democracy beyond very small groups is dependent on the idea that human beings are capable of independent rational thought and of discussing and evaluating ideas on merit. If that's not the case then the neo-reactionaries are right and democracy is doomed to failure or worse.

What I see here is a major freakout over Trump. IMHO feeling alarmed about Trump is justified, but throwing basic freedoms and the idea of the open flow of information out the window is not the right response. The right response is to ask how and why Trump won and address the problems, ideas, and arguments that led to it rationally. The solution is also to learn how to use this new medium better. If Jones' BS is more "viral," then more rational thinkers need to learn how to play the viral game. You must learn to communicate effectively using the media of the time. If you use social media you must learn to be viral just like previous generations had to study the art of the persuasive essay or how to do makeup properly so you don't look like a sweaty pig on a TV interview (see Nixon vs. Kennedy TV debates).

If it really is true that bad ideas are inherently more viral than good ones and that cannot be combatted, I do not see how democracy can survive at all in the Information Age.

Absolutely.

> If Jones' BS is more "viral," then more rational thinkers need to learn how to play the viral game.

There's an inherent danger here. Viral media is in many ways a short-attention span, high time preference sort of game. It's probably not conducive to a high level of discourse. It is IMO a race to the bottom, much the same way fast-food restaurants compete. Eventually, you need to open up a Whole Foods or two.

Why is that a problem? You can't force people to believe in reality. Might as well have this process happen in the open to actually provide a disincentive to believing conspiracy theories/propaganda/ads/fake news/whatever.

Hell, I'll go as far to say that controversial/commonly mis believed concepts are the most worth discussing in a public forum. For instance, consider white supremacy: if you give people a choice between social groups and make them feel welcome, they can use simple, self-serving logic to join the one that meets their needs. White supremacy doesn't help white people, rationally, it's just stupid, except for very convoluted goals. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/podcasts/the-daily-transc...

If you don't enable conversations between white supremacists and anti-racists, there is no real choice--they'll gravitate the group where they're accepted.

It absolutely does help the people who believe in it: it gives them a sense of superiority and someone to blame. People walked away from lynchings with a sense of satisfaction and justice, not a recognition that they'd just committed a horrible crime.

These aren't rational reasons, but since people can go through most of their lives without really having to do things for rational reasons that doesn't matter.

Doesn't the fact that white supremacists groups still get members contradict your idea here that people won't join them?

I think their point was that people join because they aren't welcome anywhere else; if there were other places where those people were welcome, maybe they wouldn't join those groups.

Ask the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook.

Even courts take context into account for the same action (e.g. whether a murder was in cold blood or premeditated, whether someone stole because they were hungry or just greedy, etc).

And, yes, "there is a time and place for stealing someone’s wallet", as well.

As for those other things (whether it's equally legally bad to kill someone regardless of "class, political belief or religious belief") all of those have been contested in actual law across societies (including western ones), even 20 and 30 years ago (and tides can always turn one way or another again).

For another example of this kind of relativism, I would harm somebody in self-defense or the defense of another, but I would not harm somebody just because I didn't like them. The underlying principles are the same even though the right action is conditional on the situation.

Be careful about the precedent your setting and think about who may wield these powers in the future. I'm sure President Alex Jones will think it quite necessary to make exceptions to ordinary laws and rules when taking down the global pedophile cabal is at stake.

I enjoy lots moderated platforms. But I still think it is important that uncensored platforms like gab exist at all.

WRT dang, even today he shut down a thread regarding the deepening SEC inquiry into Musk (which had new news as of this afternoon), and said that this was something along the lines of "Musk hysteria" or some such thing.

I was kind of shocked at the removal of that thread as it was covering a new development, and was not, as dang put it, a dupe or hysteric.

Media should take a break with reporting about Musk, most of the recent articles are either oil-sponsored FUD about Tesla or personal attacks on him.

Would be nice if Elon took a break from Twitter too...